Once a social-media-contest winner has been chosen, many businesses quickly move onto their next effort before they do any meaningful analysis of the contest’s results. In doing so, they rob themselves of the real benefits hosting a giveaway provides. Sure, engagement and follower growth metrics are indicators of success, but these kinds of vanity metrics carry little weight in upper-level executive meetings. Your bosses want to know how your giveaway — especially if it required hefty monetary and resource investments — improves the company’s bottom line.

1. Eliminate low-quality leads from your list

With your giveaway, you may have collected hundreds, or even thousands of new email addresses. But here’s the catch: Not every single of one of those leads is worth holding on to. Every additional email address you import into your CRM platform and/or email marketing service can cost you money. You don’t want to incur inflated month-over-month database storage costs because of your giveaway, so be sure to evaluate your list before you import it.

One of the first things you should do to eliminate low-quality leads by setting up a confirmation autoresponder email. Delete email addresses from people who don’t confirm their giveaway entries. You don’t want these emails anyway. Here’s why: Sometimes people try to enter your giveaway with a fake email address. When this happens, they won’t get the confirmation email to confirm their entry and these addresses are useless.

Another thing you can do to get rid of bogus email addresses from your list is inspect and edit the list. Look through your list for any addresses that don’t pass the smell test, or that appear more than once. There are many spammy giveaway sites on the web and hackers who will try to unfairly win your giveaway. In most cases, fraudulent entries are obvious to spot, the process is just time-consuming.

For brands that want to prevent bad entries from happening in the first place, it’s best to look for a giveaway service provider that has built-in fraud detection. At ShortStack, for example, we have a fraud-alert feature integrated into our campaign builder tool. If you notice you’re getting sketchy entries or a lot of votes on one particular entry (in the case of photo-vote contest), you can blacklist the URL these entries are coming from.

2. Segment your new list

A properly segmented list is a profitable list. Now that your giveaway is over and you’ve reduced your email list to only the most active and qualified leads, it’s time to segment your list.

Each business has different segmentation filters that benefit them the most. Some filters include age, gender, industry, their relationship to your business (are they already a customer of yours, or are they on another one of your other email lists?), etc. Geography is another popular filter. Many international clothing companies, as just one example, find that segmenting their list by zip code is crucial. If they don’t take the time to do this, they could end up sending messages promoting their new summer apparel to people on their list who live in Australia.

Once you know how you want to segment your list, you’ll be prepared to craft different types of messaging. This is the beauty of segmenting your giveaway list. The more personalized and refined your future messaging to your giveaway entrants is, the more effective your messages will be.

3. Share a relevant offer

Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger.com, said, “Give something valuable away in order to sell something related.” Giveaways are rooted in this give-to-get concept.

After giving your entrants a chance to win something special from your brand, give them even more. When you make every qualified person who entered your giveaway feel like a winner, your brand will win, too. One example of a brand that put this theory to work is the fragrance products company JewelScent.

A week before Valentine’s Day, JewelScent hosted a giveaway for one of their most popular products, their jewelry candle. Their week-long giveaway generated 15,675 entries. After it ended, everyone who didn’t win was sent an email with a 10% coupon for their online store. This produced $11,659.33 in direct revenue and $7,117.16 in indirect revenue.

Take a tip from JewelScent: When your giveaway period ends, share an exclusive, just-for-those-who-entered offer. And be sure to customize it to appeal to your entrants.

In conclusion, what happens after your giveaway is over is just as important as the actions you take before and during it. To reap the full benefits of hosting a giveaway, first analyze and segment your list. Next, prepare customized marketing messages. If you nail all of these post-giveaway action items, you’ll be ready to drive results your business-minded bosses will love.

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Dana Kilroy

dana@shortstacklab.com

Dana Sullivan Kilroy is ShortStack's Director of Communications and Social Media Marketing. Before joining the ShortStack team she was a writer whose work appeared in publications and sites including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Inc. and many other lifestyle publications. Reach her on Twitter @dsullyk.
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